This class can be used to communicate with a serial port under Linux or Windows. It takes the path (like '/dev/ttyS0' for linux or 'COM1' for windows) of serial device and checks whether it is valid before opening a connection to it. Once the connection is opened, it can send data to the serial port, and read answers (reading is only implemented for Linux). It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages (such as C++, C#, Python, PHP,.

DO NOT serialize data and place it into your database. Serialize can be used that way, but that's missing the point of a relational database and the datatypes inherent in your database engine. Doing this makes data in your database non-portable, difficult to read, and can complicate queries. If you want your application to be portable to other languages, like let's say you find that you want to use Java for some portion of your app that it makes sense to use Java in, serialization will become a pain in the buttocks. You should always be able to query and modify data in the database without using a third party intermediary tool to manipulate data to be inserted.

I've encountered this too many times in my career, it makes for difficult to maintain code, code with portability issues, and data that is it more difficult to migrate to other RDMS systems, new schema, etc. It also has the added disadvantage of making it messy to search your database based on one of the fields that you've serialized.

That's not to say serialize() is useless. A good place to use it may be a cache file that contains the result of a data intensive operation, for instance. There are tons of others. Just don't abuse serialize because the next guy who comes along will have a maintenance or migration nightmare.

If you are going to serialie an object which contains references to other objects you want to serialize some time later, these references will be lost when the object is unserialized. The references can only be kept if all of your objects are serialized at once.

That means: $a = new ClassA(); $b = new ClassB($a); //$b containes a reference to $a; $s1=serialize($a); $s2=serialize($b); $a=unserialize($s1); $b=unserialize($s2); now b references to an object of ClassA which is not $a. $a is another object of Class A.

Use this: $buf[0]=$a; $buf[1]=$b; $s=serialize($buf); $buf=unserialize($s); $a=$buf[0]; $b=$buf[1]; all references are intact. If serializing objects to be stored into a postgresql database, the 'null byte' injected for private and protected members throws a wrench into the system. Even pg_escape_bytea() on the value, and storing the value as a binary type fails under certain circumstances. For a dirty work around: this allows you to store the object in a readable text format as well. Solaris 8 download.